Polarization-Dependent Loss Mitigation via Orthogonal Design Precoding and Interference Cancellation

Recent work by Shehadeh and Kschischang provides a simple capacity-achieving scheme for channels with polarization-dependent loss (PDL) under common modeling assumptions via a careful choice of orthogonal-design-based precoding and interference cancellation. This letter extends that work with a simulation-based demonstration showing that this scheme remains highly effective at mitigating PDL in the highly practical setting of 16-QAM with Chase-decoded extended Hamming inner codes rather than the near-capacity inner codes considered in the original work. An alternative near-optimal variation of this scheme is also provided requiring only one inner code rather than two and suffering no penalty in the absence of PDL, making it much more practical.